


Un Concert d'enfers

by daredevilmoon



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Canon Divergence, M/M, it's set in a happy-ending verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-15 23:51:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2248014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daredevilmoon/pseuds/daredevilmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Thomas falling ill did not, unfortunately for the pair of them, impart any increase of knowledge to Philip - aside from, perhaps, the underlining that he was still ill-equipped in the dealings of day-to-day life. Sleeping with his man or not, such things weren’t acquired through osmosis</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Un Concert d'enfers

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: One of them is sick.

Thomas falling ill did not, unfortunately for the pair of them, impart any increase of knowledge to Philip - aside from, perhaps, the underlining that he was still ill-equipped in the dealings of day-to-day life. Sleeping with his man or not, such things weren’t acquired through osmosis; he’d certainly never taken the time to learn anything that may have been helpful to either himself or Thomas in such a situation.

His abilities extended chiefly to plying Thomas with aspirins and sleeping powders, which left Thomas just this edge of a drunken stupor when he emerged from beneath their spells. With the illness, however, a dreary sort of misery had taken hold of his fogged state rather than desire or disdain; it left Philip rather guiltily glad when Thomas did fall to sleep once more. Then, too, Thomas’s fever had left him spending an increasing amount of time with his face buried in Philip’s chest, pressing as much of their bodies together as he could. It seemed to  Philip rather like holding a candle to warm oneself in Hell, but there were certainly worse fates than Thomas being wrapped around him - even if it was down to the rather unflattering question of body heat.

As such, the relative cool of an empty bed was enough to half jar him from sleep. He haphazardly reached out and hit the mattress instead of Thomas and frowned to himself, taking a moment to gather his waking mind to himself. He blinked against the dark, convincing himself as best he could to not immediately fall back asleep. It wouldn’t do to have Thomas doing something mad. Not that Philip had the ability to rein him in if he had no desire to be, but Philip imagined that the suggestion of sleep would be enough to win him over.

Despite himself, he lay for a time more, drifting, before he finally stood up and, in a movement, rushed into the corridor to prevent himself from changing his mind. Trailing his hand along the wall, he outlined his path around most of the upstairs to no avail, all of it yet ensconced in dark. Philip grimaced to himself; he hated the staircase downstairs when it wasn’t black as pitch. It was a terribly narrow and winding thing and it made him feel as though he were going to fall and snap his neck in a rail.

Still, he valiantly made his way down, entering the hall at the bottom with a rather embarrassed sense of relief. There was a faint flicker of light visible from the kitchen, though it  didn’t carry quite so far as the smell of Thomas’s cigarettes which had struck him as soon as he’d opened the door upstairs.

Philip walked to the entryway and saw Thomas sitting at the table with his head in his hands, tilted in the direction of the kettle on the range. The glow of the candle gave him a dreamy quality, never more so than when he sat up to look at Philip with with somewhat unfocused eyes.

“Get the cups, would you. They’re in there,” Thomas informed, pointing at a cupboard. Philip did as he was asked before walking over to Thomas with a sigh, wrapping his arms around his waist.

“Don’t you want to go to bed?”

“After tea,” Thomas mumbled, turning around on his stool slightly to press his cigarette between Philip’s lips long enough for him to draw on it before taking it back. They remained for a moment still, against one another: a strange sort of comfort which Philip enjoyed more than he could have thought. To have grown weary of a lover’s touch was a thing he had expected, but he had done no such thing as yet with Thomas; instead there was only the increasing knowledge of comfort when they touched, of love like nothing Philip had heretofore experienced. He leaned forward to press his lips against Thomas’s temple as the kettle began to scream, but Thomas only leaned into him for a moment before finally reacting to the sound.

“Could we not bring it up to bed?” He asked, watching Thomas pour the water into the teapot. Thomas finished his tasked, turning around with a smirk.

“I’m not carrying the service up and I hardly trust you to. You’ll drop boiling water all over yourself and then where would we be?”

Philip scoffed, slightly abashed at the comment, but knew too that Thomas was entirely right - he didn’t want to carry anything up those stairs. Thomas brought the pot and the cups to the table, sitting down atop the stool across from Philip, glowering distantly. His face had been in a constant glower since he’d fallen ill if he wasn’t in a complete stupor; Philip had, for a bit, felt rather bad for it before he realised it wasn’t directed at him.

“How -” Thomas began, looking amused briefly before his voice choked off into a horrendous cough. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, leaning slightly against the table, before he slowly recovered himself, pressing flat upon the table a hand that was misted in blood. Philip saw it before it registered entirely, whereupon his stomach dropped to the floor.

“Ah,” he started uncomfortably, voice slight with unease. He reached his hand over to Thomas’s, who immediately shook his head, finally glancing up to catch Philip’s eye.

“It’s not that,” Thomas said in a voice sounding as though each syllable were being stripped from his throat piecemeal. He shook his head again, more fervently. “It’s not that. It always happens.”

“Does it?” Philip asked hesitantly, stroking the back of his nails along the tendons in Thomas’s hand. He was never one to whom illness in any sort had stuck, but he knew well enough to be sure that nothing positive was ever borne of coughing blood.

“Would I let myself die to spare you worry, do you think?”

Occasionally, the curious frankness with which Thomas spoke would evoke an ache in Philip that was so much more visceral than touch provoked. Of course the idea, put so plainly, was absurd; Thomas wasn’t that sort, thank heavens. Though obviously now miserable, nothing in him spoke to an unhappiness which Philip could have fixed; there seemed a reciprocal ease in company. The intimacy of the thought stopped Philip in his tracks and he simply sat as Thomas’s eyes ran their way around him for a moment.

“It’s my throat,” Thomas informed, a smile evident on his face before he turned away. “Nothing else. Glad I’ve got your concern, though.”

“Of course you’ve got my concern. Though you shouldn’t, stupid ass,” he said. Philip plucked the cigarette from between his fingers and, after a draw, stubbed it into the ashtray. “Honestly.”

“Before all that,” Thomas began, holding his hands near to the teapot for a moment, before rising to fetch the milk jug, “I meant to ask - How’s it you never get sick?”

“A constitution befitting a duke, I should imagine.” At that, Thomas took on such a pointed glower, this time undoubtedly directed at him, that it provoked a surprised laugh. “My father was never ill. Mother’s almost certainly pretending to be ill as we speak, though of course that’s just for the pity.”

Thomas set the jug on the table and returned to his place across from Philip, failing to stifle a yawn. “Not even been up an hour and I could go back to sleep. Pathetic,” he said, though the word was lost beneath another yawn. “Christ. Your dad were quite young when he died, though; maybe all those missed illnesses caught up with him in the end.”

“Oh, thank you - that’s a very cheering notion,” Philip said with a frown; what an absolutely ghastly prospect. He took the proffered cup of tea Thomas pushed towards him, pressing his hands tightly around the curves of it as though to melt the chill of the thought.

“That gives you another twenty years,” Thomas allowed. He absently stirred the spoon in his tea, staring down into the swirls the motions made. Philip wondered what he was thinking on just as Thomas moved the teapot and milk farther along the table, resting his extended arm on the table with his head atop it. “I may not make it through the night.”

“That’s a touch dramatic,” Philip laughed. He reached for Thomas’s hand, pressing their fingers into one another’s palms as he spoke, “Do you want another sleeping powder?”

“No,” Thomas said definitively, looking up at Philip through his lashes. “They make me feel odd, so many of them. I want this bitch of a thing over.”

He withdrew his hand from Philip’s to wrap his arms around his head briefly, burying his face in his elbows for a moment before he sat up straight. The spots of colour which painted him had begun to run or fade in turn over the previous days, fever turning him to watercolour then leaving him washed clean and wan, a sketch heavily outlined an unfilled. Now, his face carried upon it the glow of candlelight and it left him with an entirely otherwordly quality, light eyes flickering like the flame.

Thomas gave a half smile which disappeared behind his cup, as though he had caught the thread of Philip’s thoughts and sought to unravel them. Philip felt as though he were always  being caught out on things he didn’t say when Thomas looked at him. It was an altogether strange sensation, though one which he grown to enjoy  for it belonging so particularly to Thomas.  

Wordlessly, Thomas rose and placed his emptied cup down, exchanging it for the candle. “Let’s go back to bed,” he suggested, turning before Philip had responded, knowing clearly he wasn’t going to argue in favour of his cooling tea.

He found, with a perverse pleasure, that he longed for the discomfort of the heat of sleep: a dying fire, a duvet, and Thomas pressed against him chest to foot. It was fortunate, he thought with a morbid humour, his having grown so fond of the feeling of hellfire encompassing him; he needn’t even have reigned for him to choose the perfection of Hell if it were just a shade of what he happily gave into, his ever strange incubus in his arms.


End file.
